Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th October
What’s going on? I think we should be told!
After doing the morning cleaning and restocking chores, it was time to open. I trundled our sign out and into position on Broad Street. Not much footfall, but there never is first thing. At least the weather was fine, with a bit of blue sky behind the cathedral spire.
Hold on. What was happening? As I’d glanced up, a hatch had flipped open in the roof of the north aisle, and a figure in a hard hat and hi-vis jacket had started to emerge. Now two men in yellow were scrambling along the sloping roof, peering at the tiles beneath their feet, then up at the wall of the nave above them.
“Lost in thought, beuy?” It was Mr K, voice muffled by his West is Best mask.
“What’s going on, do you think?” I said. “Not often you see the roads department on a roof.”
“They always check it at this time of year,” said Mr K. “That’s where Santa lands his sleigh. The council has to do a big risk assessment before they give him a licence.”
“What like the day?” Now it was Willie Pickle stopping for a blether.
Mr K pointed at the cathedral. “Renovations,” he said. “They’re going to pebble-dash the whole of the outside. That old sandstone’s wearing away, you see – acid rain. So they’ve got to protect it.”
Willie shook his head violently so his taggsy beard shook free of his mask. “What a load of nonsense!” he cried. “Everybody kens wet-harling would be much more traditional. Pebble-dashing’s a southern abomination.”
“You reckon harling would be better?” I said.
“Oh, no argument. I went to a talk about it at the Science Festival a few years back. It was all harled originally, you ken, till Oliver Cromwell’s men chipped it off. Not puritan enough. They were against women wearing make-up too.”
“If somethings bonnie enough, you don’t need to clart it with pancake,” said Mr K. “Or a mixture or lime wash and chuckies.”
“Per-xactly,” said Willie, and fished his phone out of his jacket pocket.
As he poked his stubby finger at the keyboard Mr K winked at me and said, “I hear the budget’s pretty tight for the work. They’re not going to send men up to do it. They’ve got these kind of slurry tanker things with power jets. They can fire three tons of render a minute a hundred feet in the air. Park them on the kirk green, get the pumps going – job done.”
“What about the windows?” I said. “Wouldn’t want to break those.”
“I should think that’s what those guys are doing right now. Covering the glass with old copies of The Orcadian to protect them.”
“It’s a blooming outrage this,” said Willie. “I’m not standing for it.” He prodded at this phone, finishing with an energetic jab. “Send!” he cried.
“Is that you writing to James Stockan again?” I said.
“No, I’m going over his head this time, straight to the people. I just posted on Have a Moan Orkney.”
“Of course,” said Mr K, “They’ll have to take those trees down to get the slurry tanks up on the green.”
“What!” Willie reached for his phone again.
“Here comes the clerk of works,” said Mr K, and nodded at a goateed man in a yellow jacket, who was strolling across the kirk green towards The Reel
“I’m going to have a word,” said Willie. “And look,” he said, pointing as a car braked sharply into a space in front of the town hall, “Here comes Bruce Brass and all the boys from the depot. They’ll have seen my post. And there’ll be more on the way. We’ll throw a cordon around the whole cathedral to protect it from ahistorical renovation.”
He strode off. “Oi, you!” he shouted as he headed for the guy in the yellow jacket, who looked up, startled, at the sight of 20 stone of Willie Pickle hurtling towards him.
I turned back to Mr K. “That’s not a council man,” I said. “He’s a tourist. He was in the shop yesterday. I mind him fine because of his name, Peter von Eday. Which is funny, because he comes from Kent.”
“Kent?” said Mr K. “He’ll be the source of this pebble-dash nonsense, likely. He’s got half of it across his hi-vis.”
“That’s cause his camper van got stuck in the mud at the Point of Ness!”
“Willie’s getting stuck into him now,” he laughed, then called out across the street, “Arms around St Magnus!”
Across on the kirk green an argument was raging. It was impossible to make out what either Willie Pickle or Peter von Eday was saying, because their masks were muffling their words, even with both of them shouting at the tops of their voices.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 15th October. Other diaries will appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.